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New Mammal Species Found in Borneo
lemonysam writes "The BBC is reporting that a new mammal species has been discovered in Borneo by a conservation group trying to document the local species, as part an effort to prevent the destruction of their habitat by logging and agriculture. The species, which has not been identified by local experts or the indigenous population, is roughly the size of a domestic cat and is believed to be carnivorous."
Yes, but categories like "species" are things that we have created, not nature. Sure, it is easy to draw some lines like between a bird and a fish, but at others it is not so easy. When does one species no longer count as its former kind, but a new kind? It is feasible that this animal was once classified as something else, or was closely related to something else and avoided attention that way, and it has just now been noticed it has enough characteristics that we decided to call it something new.
If thats the case, isn't this just a headline reading, "Person decides to call something something different!" Not that I'm claiming this is the case, but it could easily be.
-Da3vid-
I suppose they are since WE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXISTED!
Take that northern spotted owl.
I have a question: Aren't class, order, genus, and family entirely arbitrary? Shouldn't we now classify living things entirely with genetics?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Hmm, But there certainly shouldn't be lemurs in Borneo.
I wonder how hot the lemur black market is? What are the chances it's just an escaped pet lemur?
You can have only two of the following three qualities when developing a product: cheap, fast or good.
Actually, Animals higher in the food chain exsist in lower numbers because of the low amount of energy transfered between each level of the food chain. So I can understand why this creature has yet to be found... especially in somewhere as obscure as the jungles of Borneo
That asside, it's incidents like this that just help show how little we still understand about our own world, yet we're still merrily destroying enormous parts of it. How many wonders will now never be known because of our actions this past century? How many will cease to exist in the coming one?
I think the words of George Carlin can answer that best.
"This planet has put up with much worse than us. It's been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, pole reversals, planetary floods, worldwide fires, tidal waves, wind and water erosion, ice ages and hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets, asteroids, and meteors. You think a few plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn't going anywhere, folks, we are! We're going away. Pack your shit - we won't leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe just a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we'll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.
The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. And it will heal itself, because that what it does; it's a self-correcting system. The air and water and earth will recover and be renewed. And if plastic isn't really degradable, most likely the planet will incorporate it into a new paradigm: The Earth Plus Plastic.
The Earth doesn't have a particular prejudice against plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. Perhaps she sees it as one of her many children. It could be the reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned here in the first place. She wanted plastic, but didn't know how to get it!
Philosophers say, "Why are we here?" The planet says, "Plastic, asshole!""
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
...I don't think they exist.
So IT IS decided that these animals will go extinct is it?Documentaion of them is the main concern?!! huh.
Why does yahoo do this
New York is on the coast. It'll only take a few tsunami to shift it, and over millions of years there'll be plenty of those.
Perhaps, 60 million years or so from now, one would find traces of the megacities if one looked carefully in the right place. I suspect our deep earthworks might be longer-lasting; I can't see much that's likely to shift the Channel Tunnel, for instance.
And if the next intelligent race arises when we're as long gone as the last dinosaurs, I'll tell them one place they can look where they'll surely find some of our relics. And a message. 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969. We came in peace for all mankind. Signed, Richard Nixon.'
That will last a while, but the meteorites will eventually powder it, and the dying Sun will consume Earth and Moon alike. Will anything of ours last longer still? Thus far, I can think of four candidates. Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2. Maybe they'll be found. Maybe someone will come across them and know we were once here, long after the Sun is a dying ember of degenerate carbon. But I doubt it. Space is a big place in which to look for a few tiny, silent, eons-dead robots.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Right, god forbid those people actually living in Borneo be allowed to scrape out a living.
Shut up, your "righteous indignation" fails when people will have to starve for your conscience to be soothed.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
The taxonomic system is most certainly designed. There is no such thing as a "tree of life." It is a human construction. If you look back through biological history, you can plot the descendency of various genetic lines, and these plots look tree-like. But the only thing that exists, right now, are the "leaves" of that tree -- individual species.
But nature itself has no need for names and systems to organize the various types of life forms. Life simply is what it is. We humans impose our abstractions on reality, not vice versa. Taxonomy is synthetic.